Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Several lines of research have suggested that information previously integrated into memory can influence inferences and judgments, even w h e n more recent information discredits it. A first experiment tested the prediction that information providing causal structure, versus being mentioned but otherwise unintegrated into the account, would lead to more influence, and found that subjects used both discredited and valid information affording causal structure to make inferences, but not incidentally mentioned information with the same content Experiment 2 found that w hen a plausible causal alternative accompanied the correction, subjects showed less influence from the discredited information than when the correction simply negated earlier information. The findingssuggest that the continued influence of discredited information depends on the causal structure it affords